16-00 hrs: I have spent all day writing and editing Joomla! documentation. What I call - the Joomla! project. It would be nice to be able to release it into the wild sooner rather than later.

I have not really drunk a lot of coffee but it signifies something about measuring out life.

Wigeon. They hang out along the river on grassy knolls that cover at high water springs. Nice.

21-00 hrs: I do not want you to assume anything in particlar about how I am getting on. This is a bit unfair as I tend to tell you about what I am doing, which always makes me sound a lot more active and positive than I feel. I find it hard to write about anything else  - . So I tell you that last week was focussed on my Joomla! documentation project, interspersed with shopping and cooking and walks along the river and various worries.

But the important thing is that I have been wondering (at some length and in some depth) about what I would be doing if I were normally healthy. This leads me to alternately want to plan ahead and not to plan ahead. 

I rather think the pictures with my two previous posts are significant as an indication of looking ahead and not having a fixed point.

21-00 hrs: Orford beach - only accessible by boat. To the left - the open sea:  to the right - the River Ore.
I went on a river trip for an hour - wearing every stitch of clothing I could get into. http://www.orfordrivertrips.co.uk/ The boat was picking up fishermen - so I got to go ashore for a walk.  Good stuff and continues to convince readers that I am really living a holiday-life here. But I had done three hours writing documentation before I left.

12-25 hrs: Looking downstream along the river wall downstream from Woodbridge. To the left - the river with wigeon feeding on the grassy patches. To the right - pasture with wigeon on the flooded pools. I wonder if they nest here later in the year. The pasture is slightly saline and grazed by large cattle.

I often walk along this path - sometimes it is quiet and empty - at others it is too crowded.

18-00 hours: I took this today alongside a building near the river, where it has been in sight for some days. Shows something about the weather round here I suppose, which is now a lot warmer than it has been. Not many other green shoots around - but I have seen pussy-willow.

15-40 hours: This is a reconstruction of  Rhynia gwynne-vaughanii - one of the most common plants in the Rhynie ecosystem (about 400 million years ago).

I have no idea why I have not posted something for so long. It is not that I have been doing lots of significant things. But after New Year various things have turned up - like going to Ipswich hospital for an Xray (taking an hour or so - hardly a reason for not writing). A combination of getting yet more stuff out of my boat, scrubbing the bottom of boats at the sailing club, sanding my rudder in the bath, trying to write documentation, trying to 'do' plant fossils, having visitors and doing the normal things of life. 

The reconstruction is of  Rhynia gwynne-vaughanii - a member of an extinct group of primitive plants called the rhyniophytes, characterised by simple branching and naked stems.  But why is this here? - I have been torturing the brain trying to understand things about plant evolution- for the U3A geology group. We have now reached the Devonian. There are some cherts (from the village of Rhynie in north east Scotland, about 50km north west of Aberdeen) with a whole ecosystem preserved in detail in the chert. And I am unfamiliar with all the concepts and all the vocabulary - - .

And what about 2011 - -

9-00 hrs: - - we don't know! - - so the usual wishes that it turns out better than other years. 

One thing I am doing - I am writing some 'hands-on' documentation for people getting started using Joomla! I have been intending to tell you about this for some time because it is now central to my life. It is difficult and has made a great improvement to my general well-being. I have not felt bored since I started doing it for real.  And I feel more alive - doing something new and somehow real. This is all supported by the new medication, Tarceva. But my feeling of well-being has gone up since I started this writing. Strange and understandable.

Things done so far start here:-

http://docs.joomla.org/Joomla!_Getting_Started_Manual

I had to learn another mark-up language for the wiki layout - and I am supposed to write in short sentances - so it does nothing for literary style - sigh.

I notice I have not said what Jooma! does - I leave that for another post.